Windows is absolutely not VMS. They share a common founding father [wikipedia.org], but (Open)VMS is still easily considered far more capable and forward thinking in many respects than Windows ever has been.

Sir I used VMS, knew VMS, VMS was a friend of mine, Windows is no VMS.

Cutler used some of the same IDEAS he used in VMS, same as Torvalds rightly or wrongly, depending on your opinion of the results, used ideas from minix and Unix, but the results are NOT the same. Most of the ideas like portability which Cutler incorporated into early NT in fact were removed for speed, which is now why MSFT can't get away from X86, if they would have actually kept Cutler's ideas it would have been trivial to port, but they went the speed route and it bit them in the ass.

For an example of how badly "Wintel" infected that company look at how Cyrix and Winchip ran great on OS/2 and BeOS but barely passable on Windows, or hell how the Bulldozer arch by AMD gets a lot more performance under linux than Windows.

Not for the plebs in my office. I keep finding the Ask toolbar and McAffee shite on [self employeed] brokers' computers - it turns out the update installers don't remember your preference - why would they, it would mean less installs.

I'm somewhat saddened when I look just now and find that all of my old ftpsearch sites are gone. But somewhat relieved when I realize that I really haven't needed them in a decade or so, which is why I didn't notice that they'd disappeared.

And on dial-up, that used to take about 6 minutes per 1mb zip file, and always when the download reached 99% the dreaded 'click - Purrrrrrrrrrr' of the modem disconnecting happened, so you would have to download it all again after dialling up again.

And on dial-up, that used to take about 6 minutes per 1mb zip file, and always when the download reached 99% the dreaded 'click - Purrrrrrrrrrr' of the modem disconnecting happened, so you would have to download it all again after dialling up again.

Used to take days to get big files.

That reminds me of how awesome zmodem was with its resume capability. That changed things for the better. Then we moved on to http and lost resume for the longest time again...

So long and thanks for all the fish, Altavista.I first learned search engine optimization by studying Alatavista, then moved on to Hotbot (Inktomi).That was the beginning of a great business, and my first good paying job.

I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.

I remember back in the day when Google was a search engine that actually responded correctly to + and - to fine-tune results, and when Google even listened to the actual words you typed, rather than replacing them with what it thinks are synonyms or sometimes random words that have nothing to do with what I'm searching for.

I gave up using Google over a year ago because it had become so hard to get it to actually search for the exact words I type, instead of having it try to guess what I mean.

I remember back in the day AltaVista was the only search engine which allowed you to use + and - to fine-tune the results. Before Google's pagerank that was the best you could hope for.

From the for what it's worth department... when Google dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms, which was shortly before it introduced Google+, it was incredibly contentious inside Google itself, and a lot of Google employees at the time, myself included, complained bitterly about the ability to get accurate results any more.

Most of use were natural lexicographers who could think hierarchically enough that we knew the search terms we wanted in order to get the results we wanted. surprising how we ended up working at a search engine, right? About 2/3rds of us really felt they were "dumbing down" search in order to use the same datastores for normal search as the first and second order relationships being used to generate targetted advertising results. Altavista was mentioned *a lot*.

Google never dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms; they just changed the syntax without telling anyone. Before you had to prepend a + to any term you wanted to include in the results. Now you instead need to surround the term with quotation marks.

If I want to search for exact words in any order, "A" "B" "C" is NOT the same as +A +B +C was, since it doesn't force inclusion. Instead I get ""best" and "useful" results, rather than results based on my judgement.

This is great for most people, who don't know how search engines work, don't care, or are just looking for sponsored results or porn, but it's not that useful to, for example, get results containing technical reports and papers in a particular field (for example). For CS, there's citeseer searching, but for biology and other fields, it's a real pain.

Yeah, I'm still ticked off that I can't force term searches anymore. Google does really well most of the time, but sometimes I need a particular word or the exclusion of a particular word, and Google doesn't obey anymore.

And its "NEAR" operator allowed me to fine-tune the results in ways unmatched even by today's search engines.

Parentheses, boolean operators, the NEAR operator... Altavista was the true hacker's choice for powerful web search. We don't lose it today, though: We lost it when it was turned into a rebranded Yahoo.

Anyway, the "running gag" comment just goes to show how low this place has sunk.

It was the only search engine that allowed very specific +/- combos. I remember it being better in that respect than Google is now (although Google was vastly better returning correct results when it came on the scene).

For years now, when checking for DNS resolution and basic Internet connectivity from whatever network I'm in, my first quick test has been "ping altavista.com". Year after year, I trusted that if the Internet connection was working, I'd get a response. Altavista never let me down:)

AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.

That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.

Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free.

Except OpenText/Yahoo who did it a year earlier.

They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines.

No they didn't. They had a single massive DEC Alpha Server with some untold number of GB of RAM, which at the time was unprecedented. Using racks of machines was an idea developed later by Eric Brewer from Excite.

The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.

It was released as a demo of what a single AlphaServer machine could do. The project started by people who thought "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then the marketing droids released it as a demo. The single machine architecture bottlenecked their inde

Who even owns Lycos any more? Last I heard Telefonica sold them off to some Korean investors who shut the place down to minimal size.Whowhere (which they acquired to get MailCity, which became Lycos Mail) still exists but I can't imagine what people database it searches.

Back in the day, it was the best search engine out there. Used it dozens of times every day. Granted, that was back when "www.hp.com" was an invalid URL and you had to use "www.hp.boise.com" to get a printer driver, but still....

Can't necessarily say I''m "sad" to see them go, but it does raise a little pang of nostalgia.....

Yeah - loved it in the early days, but Google just nuked it as far as speed of search results and page load time went, and then it went the way of the dodo. One of the things they did far better than Google for a long time was translate. Google's first few passes at it produced some pretty horrible translations and lacked much of an idiom database, something they've vastly improved since (milchgesicht comes out 'baby face' now, not 'milk face' when translated from German, for instance, and Altavista's babelfish was one of the few that got it correct for a long time).

Ah, the original babelfish link, http://babelfish.altavista.com./ [babelfish.altavista.com] I used it long after I started using Google for searches. Agreed, the translations were head and shoulders above everybody else.

Astonishing that they killed a respected (if unserviced) Brand like 'Altavista', and went on using a stupid (if Swiftean) word like 'Yahoo'. So it's not just Microsoft and HP that can get global marketing completely wrong.

Do you remember DEC? If they could see the potential in search engine market, they would end up buying Compaq and HP, with the head start they have. For the sake of fairness, I do not think nobody could see search services as a major product before Google showed us.

In my thinking, although your point may carry too, Google nuked Alta-Vista because it had a page free from clutter. Back then everyone was trying to be a portal and Alta-vista and Yahoo, etc. looked like crap and I recall the load time being so long because of all the crap they flung at you. This was back in phone modem days. Then along comes Google with a single line on a white page. I thought, "wow, they are not trying to exploit me." and whether they were or not, it worked. Once they established the repu

Back when I was still using altavista, I heard something about a search engine called "google" here on slashdot. People seemed to like it, but I couldn't figure out why. Lots of people raved about how cool their "simple" page was, but I didn't think that was a big deal. Tried google once in the beginning, wasn't impressed with the search results, and kept going with altavista.

Was probably a little over a year later I was looking for something, altavista wasn't finding it, so out of desperation I figured I'd give this "google" thing a try. The exact thing I was looking for was the first result. Never used altavista again.

By the way. I never did buy into that whole "Don't be evil" crap. I wasn't born yesterday.

What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.

Back in the day it was a terrible search engine for anything but warez! I'm not sure what internet you are using but I'm sure on mine it was a horrible search engine, snap was better, most of Altavistas results were hispanic.

When you say, "back in the day," when exactly do you mean? AltaVista was indeed a great service in the mid-to-late 1990s, until it succumbed to spam, porn, and advertisement corruption, like the rest of them.

Yes but AltaVista just prior to google was an interesting search engine. Type in your query, wait for the results and then immediately skip to page 3 completely ignoring the first two pages, quick preview of page 3 and the skip to page 5 sometimes even page 7 before the results you were looking for actually started to showed up, MSN search was just as bad (part of the reason for the $ in M$).